tippergreen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tippergreen) wrote2025-02-09 03:26 pm
tippergreen) wrote2025-02-09 03:26 pm
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NYT Writing Prompts - 2
I don't know why these writing prompts keep making me a little maudlin, but here we go. The prompt was to write a story based on the image below. This isn't a story, just a slice of life:
ALWAYS SMILING
I found the photograph while cleaning. We had a box in the back closet, the one in the guest room, that houses everything we no longer think about but can’t seem to get rid of. My wedding dress is in there. Old purses I no longer use. Notebooks filled with scribblings of a 20-something brain that wouldn’t know depth if she were a hundred feet under the ocean.
Which, of course, explains the box of photographs, because once we all went digital, physical photographs were of a bygone age. Like the typewriter. Or the Thighmaster.
The photos I took when I was younger were almost all of family. During vacations, mostly, or the holidays, crammed around the table, smiling forcefully for the camera. Sometimes, though, ghosts of people you forgot were there show up.
Always smiling.
She was a ghost. A friend who, that one Thanksgiving, had nowhere else to go. We welcomed her in, and she was quiet and nodded at everything, smiled and pretended this was where she wanted to be. That she was having a good time. That she didn’t wish she were on a plane back to her own family, thousands of miles away.
We tried to make her feel welcome. It’s what you do. But she wasn’t having a good time. She wasn’t where she wanted to be.
She told me later, she had never felt more alone.
I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what loneliness meant. I did later, as I do now, as I got older and family and friends and dreams drifted farther and farther away.
She just knew earlier than the rest of us; her sickness hastened that for her. That as your tree grows bigger, and the branches get farther apart, so much so that you can’t even see half of them anymore, and your relations grow more strained, your friends more distant, your time more fleeting, that separation is part of life, and so is loneliness, and even the ones you love the most become ghosts.
She died. She never got married or had kids or a pet. She never went home again. She got sick, and then she was gone, and now she’s just a smiling face in a photograph, from a memory I’d long since forgotten.
But still. She smiled. And, as the memory wisped by when I found the photograph, I smiled as well.
ALWAYS SMILING
I found the photograph while cleaning. We had a box in the back closet, the one in the guest room, that houses everything we no longer think about but can’t seem to get rid of. My wedding dress is in there. Old purses I no longer use. Notebooks filled with scribblings of a 20-something brain that wouldn’t know depth if she were a hundred feet under the ocean.
Which, of course, explains the box of photographs, because once we all went digital, physical photographs were of a bygone age. Like the typewriter. Or the Thighmaster.
The photos I took when I was younger were almost all of family. During vacations, mostly, or the holidays, crammed around the table, smiling forcefully for the camera. Sometimes, though, ghosts of people you forgot were there show up.
Always smiling.
She was a ghost. A friend who, that one Thanksgiving, had nowhere else to go. We welcomed her in, and she was quiet and nodded at everything, smiled and pretended this was where she wanted to be. That she was having a good time. That she didn’t wish she were on a plane back to her own family, thousands of miles away.
We tried to make her feel welcome. It’s what you do. But she wasn’t having a good time. She wasn’t where she wanted to be.
She told me later, she had never felt more alone.
I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what loneliness meant. I did later, as I do now, as I got older and family and friends and dreams drifted farther and farther away.
She just knew earlier than the rest of us; her sickness hastened that for her. That as your tree grows bigger, and the branches get farther apart, so much so that you can’t even see half of them anymore, and your relations grow more strained, your friends more distant, your time more fleeting, that separation is part of life, and so is loneliness, and even the ones you love the most become ghosts.
She died. She never got married or had kids or a pet. She never went home again. She got sick, and then she was gone, and now she’s just a smiling face in a photograph, from a memory I’d long since forgotten.
But still. She smiled. And, as the memory wisped by when I found the photograph, I smiled as well.